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Describes research on the processes and outcomes of consumer socialisation; it investigates the importance of the family as the main socialisation agent for young children. Shows how parents influence child behaviour directly through instruction in consumer skills, indirectly as models of consumer behaviour, and by supervision of the child’s consumer opportunities; also by influencing cognitive abilities, motivating the child to use its cognitive abilities in consumer situations, and teaching consumer skills which are unrelated to cognitive ability. Relates changes in US family demographic patterns to children as consumers: more single‐parent families and working mothers may mean less contact and socialisation of children by parents, while greater ethnic diversity and mixed‐race families affects the way that children are socialised. Test four hypotheses: that parents of younger children engage in less direct instruction of consumer behaviours than parents of older children; that parents engage in more direct consumer instruction, co‐shopping and co‐viewing with daughters than with sons; that more highly educated parents engage in more direct consumer instruction, co‐shopping and co‐viewing than do parents with lower levels of education; and that ethnicity is a factor in parental consumer instruction, co‐shopping and co‐viewing. Discusses the results of the survey questionnaire used for this US study of parents with children between two and eight years old; the results roughly confirm the first three of these four hypotheses.

The aim of this paper is to contribute to an understanding of how the child consumer has been constructed in experience advertising in a historical perspective, how the view of the child has changed and how the presentation of the “good” experience has developed.

The study is based on ads in the Danish children's magazine Donald Duck. The study is a historical overview drawing on both quantitative and qualitative approaches, drawing theoretically on consumer, childhood and experience theory.

The results show that the “child consumer” has moved from being invisible on the backstage to the very front of the stage in experience advertising during the four decades examined. Moreover, the idea of what an experience is for the child has changed radically and a move occurs from a focus on aesthetic experiences to experiences of immersion and challenges of the senses. The most recent ads promote the child as not just the co‐creator but the actual creator of the experience.

It is a limitation that the study is based on a Danish sample only, and findings cannot be generalized to other national markets. It would, however, be interesting to compare with other national markets.

Marketing implications of the findings could be to go further into the direction of user generated experiences as suggested in the most recent ads, e.g. in the direction of online games where the consumer is him or herself writing the storyline of the experience unlike the pre‐planned rides most amusement parks offer today.

This study draws on child experience professionals, who have been found to be more proactive in recognizing the child consumer than, e.g. academics, and in translating the view of the children as actors to advertising copy and imagery. These marketing professionals have from early on addressed children in their own language clearly perceiving them as consumers in their own right. The most recent ads staging the consumer as creator of experiences challenge Pine and Gilmore's experience realms and call for a new way of conceptualizing and offering experiences. This is interesting for researchers working with perceptions of childhood and actors working with commercial conceptualizations of experiences.

This paper aims to offer both a practical and reflective stance on a longitudinal multi-method interpretive consumer research project carried out with tween girls.

This multi-layered approach to data collection, involving qualitative diaries, accompanied shopping trips, e-collages and in-depth interviews, addresses the need, as articulated by Morrow and Richards (1996, p. 96) to “move away from the narrow focus of socialization and child development” toward a research approach that prioritizes children’s own experiences of their lives as children, thereby reconsidering the richness of children’s voices.

In line with those whose work seeks to privilege children’s knowledge of the world they inhabit while also emphasizing the need, as in the case of adult “doing” to place that existence within its broader social context (Russell and Tyler, 2005, p. 227), diaries, in-depth interviews, shopping trips, e-collages and researcher diaries were used to access the world of these social neophytes as they mediate their social worlds through the ever pervasive prism of consumer culture. The light and shade of their worlds cannot be captured by adult-oriented perspectives on research which assume that young consumers are incompetent, worthy of debate merely to ascertain levelness of agency or of interest merely to quantify degrees of participation in and comprehension of the semiotic markers of our consumer society.

Only female consumers were involved in this study which underlines the need to engage with both genders when it comes to researching young consumers.

This paper offers a tangible contribution to the movement of research toward understanding young consumers’ worlds through engagement with multi-layered discourses and representations.

This multi-layered, multi-method research project acknowledges the enthralling complexity of these young consumers’ social worlds, giving a richness and immediacy to their accounts of the compelling intimacy between young adolescent identity and the marketplace.

In Australia, the child care industry has experienced substantial growth since 1991 resulting in a proliferation of child care centres throughout the country, to the point where supply of child care places is now in excess of demand. As a result, child care marketers now compete within a turbulent environment where it is vital to satisfy and retain customers in order to survive. Seeks to increase our knowledge of child care services consumption behaviour, and assist the child care marketer to understand their consumers and the difficulties they face as they interact with a service that they do not experience first hand. A self‐administered survey instrument was developed and administered to a sample of child care service switchers. The results indicate significant findings within, and between choice, switching, and post‐switching dimensions. The exploration of decision‐making areas provides a number of practical implications not only for the child care marketer, but also for government policy makers, child care consumers, and service providers in general.

Past consumer socialization research suggests that differences in the consumption patterns of children from dissimilar socioeconomic backgrounds can be attributed to differences in their consumer skills. We suggest, however that children’s consumer environments rather than deficiencies in skills may be able to better explain differences in children’s consumer behaviors. Toward that end, two studies are conducted. In the first, we perform an extensive qualitative evaluation of the consumer environments of children from disparate socioeconomic backgrounds. In the second, we survey the same children to gather data on their consumption patterns. Neighborhood of origin appears to play a large role in the children’s responses.

The purpose of this paper is to offer a selective and necessarily truncated history of the place and use of qualitative approaches in the study of children's consumption in order to provide some depth of understanding regarding differences between and commonalities of approaches employed by academic market researchers, social science researchers and, to a lesser extent, market practitioners.

The paper examines key research statements about children's consumption beginning in the 1930s to ascertain the underlying conception of the child informing the work.

It is argued that there has been a displacement of psychologically oriented, developmental conceptions of the child with sociological and anthropological conceptions resulting in an acceptance of the child as a more or less knowing, competent consumer. This shift has become manifest in a rise and acceptance of qualitative research on children's consumer behaviour by social science and marketing academics as well as by market practitioners such as market researchers.

Methods – here qualitative methods – must be seen as enactments of theories about conceptions of the person, rather than simply as neutral tools that uncover extant truths.

Attending to how one “constructs” the child may usefully inform debates about the harmfulness or usefulness of goods and messages directed to children.

This paper helps in understanding the long history of children as consumers, how they have been understood and approached by market and academic researchers interested in consumption and various ways conceptions of ‘the child’ can be used.

This article seeks to make a critical contribution to the contemporary debate on the active role of children as consumers, exploring the different meanings children confer on consumer goods and spaces in retail settings.

A total of 60 children were unobtrusively observed in ten Italian apparel stores.

Children tend to subvert the stores' possible uses and symbolizations by actively re‐appropriating the meanings of products, promotional stimuli and spaces through play.

The analysis of children's lived experience of commercial spaces enables retailers to adjust the stores' environment to children's demands, recognising their role as active meaning creators.

The playful re‐appropriation of spaces, products and promotional stimuli emerged as a mechanism through which children learn to consume, reinforcing their knowledge and attitudes about retail settings, products and brands.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate a marketer-sponsored edutainment centre as a consumer socialisation agent by examining effects on preference for the sponsor brands and the degree of socialisation children experience.

Interviews were undertaken with 16 children in their analytical stage of development as well as one of their parents immediately prior, immediately after, and one week following a part-day visit to the heavily branded edutainment centre Kidzania.

Results suggest that children did experience consumer socialisation. There was a movement in brand preferences towards the sponsored brands. The children also demonstrated advances in transaction knowledge. Specifically, significant increases were found in product and brand knowledge, shopping scripts and retail knowledge, with some children moving beyond perceptual and analytical thought and demonstrating reflective thought. In contrast, most children did not demonstrate an analytical level of advertising and persuasion knowledge.

Findings are constrained by the children’s specific experiences and the aptitude of both the children as interviewees and the parents as observers/interpreters. Although delayed measures were used this does not necessarily confirm permanency of the effects.

This is the first study to date to examine a marketer-sponsored edutainment centre as a socialisation agent. Specifically, the study contributes to the understanding of this new, participatory form of marketing communications by demonstrating its value in achieving brand objectives while fostering the consumer socialisation of children.

Explores the consumer behaviour patterns of urban Chinese children as a primary and an influence market. Examines, as primary customers, their income, spending and saving pattern. Finds that they have two different types of income, save over half of it, and spend the rest on snack items, and the largest portion on school‐related items. Analyses their influence on the spending behaviour of their parents and grandparents among 25 product categories and the results reveal that they influence around two‐thirds of parents' purchases. Also considers role of age and gender on children's consumer behaviour. Discusses some marketing implications.

Looks at the influence of television on children’s development as consumers, beginning with a literature review of consumer socialisation which establishes the importance of television as an influential model for children’s expressions of nonverbal behaviour and emotion. Explains the results of a survey of Malaysian schoolchildren which considers demographic variables such as gender and family income, and also personality traits, in relation to television viewing habits and consumer behaviour, including propensity to buy, time spent watching television, preferred type of programme etc. Discusses the results, which indicate the importance of family income as a predictor of differences in socialisation; gender is less influential, and of the six personality traits studied, the aggressive ‐ passive is the most influential on socialisation.